O’erthrow this title, they have none at all.
But the national cupidity that was proof to the caustic ridicule of Churchill, has been proof to the still more powerful assault of public execration, under the growth of Christian knowledge. The Bible is now in almost every man’s hand; its burning and shining light blazes full on the grand precept, “Do as thou would’st be done by;” and are the tribes of India, or Africa, or America, or Oceanica, the better for it? Are they not still our slaves and our Gibeonites, and driven before our arms like the wild beasts of the desert? We need not therefore stay to express our abhorrence of Spanish cruelty, or describe at great length the deeds of own countrymen in any quarter of the globe,—it is enough to say that English and American treatment of the aborigines of their colonies is but Spanish cruelty repeated. With one or two beautiful exceptions, which we shall have the greatest pleasure in pointing out, no more regard has been paid to the rights or the feelings of the North American Indians by the English and their descendants, than was paid to the South Americans by the Spanish and Portuguese.
Every reader of history is aware of the melancholy and disastrous commencement of most of our American colonies. The great cause was that they were founded in injustice. Adventurers, with charters from the English monarch in their pockets, as the Spaniards and Portuguese had the Pope’s bull in theirs, landed on the coast of America and claimed it for their own, reckoning the native inhabitants of no more account than the bears and fallow-deer of the woods. They had got a grant of the country from their own king; but whence had he got his grant? That is not quite so clear. The Pope’s claim is intelligible enough: he was, in his own opinion, God’s viceroy and steward, and disposed of his world in that character; but the Bible was the English monarch’s law, and where did the Bible appoint Elizabeth or James God’s steward? Where did it appoint either of them “a judge and a ruler over” the Indians? Truly Elizabeth, with all her vaunting, had read her Bible to little purpose, as we fear most monarchs and their ministers to the present hour have done. We must say of the greater part of North America, as Erskine said of India—“it is a country which God never gave us, and acquired by means that he will never justify.”
The misery attending the first planting of our colonies in America was equal to the badness of our principles. The very first thing which the colonists in the majority of cases seem to have done, was to insult and maltreat the natives, thus making them their mortal enemies, and thus cutting off all chance of the succours they needed from the land, and the security essential to their very existence. For about a century, nothing but wretchedness, failure, famine, massacres by the Indians, were the news from the American colonies. The more northern ones, as Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York, we took from the French and the Dutch; the more southern, as Florida and Louisiana, were obtained at a later day from the Spaniards. We shall here therefore confine our brief notice chiefly to the manner of settling the central eastern states, particularly Virginia, New England, and Pennsylvania.
For eighty-two years from the granting of the charter by Elizabeth to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to the abandonment of the country by Sir Walter Raleigh for his El Dorado visions, the colony of Virginia suffered nothing but miseries, and was become, at that period, a total failure. The first settlers were, like the Spaniards, all on fire in quest of gold. They got into squabbles with the Indians, and the remnant of them was only saved by Sir Francis Drake happening to touch there on his way home from a cruise in the West Indies. A second set of adventurers were massacred by the Indians, not without sufficient provocation; and a third perished by the same means, or by famine induced by their unprincipled and impolitic treatment of the natives. The first successful settlement which was formed was that of James-Town, on James River, in Chesapeak Bay, in 1607. But even here scarcely had they located themselves, when their abuse of the Indians involved them in a savage warfare with them. They took possession of their hunting-grounds without ceremony; and they cheated them in every possible way in their transactions with them, especially in the purchases of their furs. That they might on the easiest terms have lived amicably with the Indians, the history of the celebrated Captain John Smith of that time sufficiently testifies. He had been put out of his rank, and treated with every contumely by his fellow colonists, till they found themselves on the verge of destruction from the enraged natives. They then meanly implored him to save them, and he soon effected their safety by that obvious policy which, if men were not blinded by their own wickedness, would universally best answer their purpose. He began to conciliate the offended tribes; to offer them presents and promises of kindness; and the consequence was, they soon flocked into the settlement again in the most friendly manner, and with plenty of provisions. But even Smith was not sufficiently aware of the power of friendship; he chose rather to attack some of the Indians than to treat with them, and the consequence was that he fell into their hands, and was condemned to die the death of torture.
But here again, the better nature of the Indians saved him: and that incident occurred which is one of the most romantic in American history. He was saved from execution at the last moment, by the Indian beauty Pocahontas, the daughter of the great Sachem Powhatan. This young Indian woman, who is celebrated by the colonists and writers of the time, as of a remarkably fine person, afterwards married a Mr. Rolfe, an English gentleman of the colony. She was brought over by him to see England, and presented at court, where she was received in a distinguished manner by James and his queen. This marriage, which makes a great figure in the early history of the colony, was a most auspicious event for it. It warmly disposed the Indians towards the English. They were anxious that the colonists should make other alliances with them of the same nature, and which might have been attended with the happiest consequences to both nations; but though some of the best families of Virginia now boast of their descent from this connexion, the rest of the colonists of the period held aloof from Indian marriages as beneath them. They looked on the Indians rather as creatures to be driven to the woods—for, unlike the negroes, they could not be compelled to become slaves—than to be raised and civilized; and therefore, spite of the better principles which the short government of that excellent man Lord Delaware had introduced, they were soon again involved in hostilities with them. The Indians felt deeply the insult of the refusal of alliance through marriage with them; they felt the daily irritation of attempts to overreach them in their bargains, and they saw the measures they were taking to seize on their whole country. They saw that there was to be no common bond of interest or sympathy between them; that there was to be a usurping and a suffering party only; and they resolved to cut off the grasping and haughty invaders at a blow. A wide conspiracy was set on foot; and had it not been in this case, as in many others, that the compassionate feelings of one of the Indians partially revealed the plot at the very moment of its execution, not an Englishman would have been left alive. As it was, a dreadful massacre ensued; and more than a fourth of the colonists perished. The English, in their turn, fell on the Indians, and a bloody war of extermination followed. When the colonists could no longer reach them in the depths of their woods, they offered them a deceitful peace. The Indians, accustomed in their own wars to enter sincerely into their treaties of peace when inclined to bury the tomahawk—were duped by the more artful Europeans. They came forth from their woods, planted their corn, and resumed their peaceful hunting. Just as the harvest was ripe, the English rushed suddenly upon them, trampled down their crops, set fire to their wigwams, and chased them again to the woods with such slaughter, that some of the tribes were totally exterminated!
Such was the mode of settling Virginia. What trust or cordiality could there afterwards be between such parties? Accordingly we find, from time to time, in the history of this colony, fresh plots of the natives to rid themselves of the whites, and fresh expeditions of the whites to clear the country of what they termed the wily and perfidious Indians. These dreadful transactions, which continued for the most part while the English government continued in that country, gave occasion to that memorable speech of Logan, the chief of the Shawanees, to Lord Dunmore the governor: a speech which will remain while the English language shall remain, to perpetuate the memory of English atrocity, and Indian pathos.—“I now ask of every white man, whether he hath ever entered the cottage of Logan when hungry, and been refused food? Whether coming naked, and perishing with cold, and Logan has not clothed him? During the last war, so long and so bloody, Logan has remained quietly upon his mat, wishing to be the advocate of peace. Yes, such is my attachment to white men, that even those of my nation, when they pass by me, pointed at me, saying—‘Logan is the friend of white men!’ I had even thought of living among you; but that was before the injury I received from one of you. Last summer, Colonel Cressup massacred in cold blood, and without any provocation, all the relations of Logan. He spared neither his wife nor his children. There is not now one drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature! This is what has excited my revenge. I have sought it. I have killed several of your people, and my hatred is appeased. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace; but imagine not that my joy is instigated by my fear. Logan knows not what fear is. He will never turn his back in order to save his life. But alas! no one remains to mourn for Logan when he shall be no more!”
The conduct of the English towards the natives in the Carolinas may be summed up in a single passage of the Abbé Raynal: “Two wars were carried on against the natives of the most extravagant description. All the wandering or fixed nations between the ocean and Appalachian mountains, were attacked and massacred without any interest or motive. Those who escaped being put to the sword, either submitted or were dispersed.” The remnant of the tribe of the Tuscaroras fled into the state of New York.
Maryland, in its early history, also exhibits its quota of Indian bloodshed; but much of this is chargable to the account of the colonists of Virginia. Lord Baltimore, who first colonised this province in the reign of Charles I., was a Catholic, who sought an asylum for his persecuted brethren of the same faith. Since the change of religion in England, the Catholics had experienced the bitterness of that persecution of which they, while in power, had been so liberal. This seems to have had an excellent effect upon some of them. Lord Baltimore and the colonists who went out with him, being most of them of good Catholic families, determined to allow liberty of conscience, and admitted people of all sorts. This gave great offence to their royalist neighbours in Virginia, who, not permitting any liberty of religious sentiment, found those whom they drove away by their severities flocking into Maryland, and being there well received, strengthening it at their expense. They therefore circulated all kinds of calumnies amongst the Indians against the Maryland Catholics, especially telling them that they were Spaniards—a name of horror to Indian ears. Alarmed by this representation, they fell on the colonists whom they had at first received with their usual kindness, laid waste their fields, massacred without mercy all that they could meet; and were not undeceived till after a long course of patient endurance and friendly representation.
The settlement of New England presents some new features. It was not merely a settlement of English Protestants, but of the Protestants of Protestants—the Puritans. A class of persons having thus made two removes from Popery; having not only protested against the errors of Rome, but against those of the very church which had seceded from Rome, and professed to purify itself from its corruptions; having, moreover, suffered severely for their religious faith, might be supposed to have acquired far clearer views of the rights of humanity from their better acquaintance with the Bible, and might be expected to respect the persons and the property of the natives in whose lands they went to settle, more than any that went before them. They went as men who had been driven out of their own country, and from amongst their own kindred, for the maintenance of the dearest privileges and the most sacred claims of men; and they might be supposed to address the natives as they reached their coast in terms like these: “Ancient possessors of a free country, give us a place of refuge amongst you. You are termed savages, but you cannot be more savage than the people of our own land, who have inflicted dreadful cruelties and mutilations on us and our friends for the faith we have in God. We fly from savages who pretend to be civilized, but have learned no one principle of civilization, to savages who pretend to no civilization, but yet have, on a thousand occasions, received white men to their shores with benevolence and tears of joy. What the savages of Europe are, a hundred regions drenched in the blood of their native children can tell; that we deem you less savage than them, the very act of our coming to you testifies. Give us space amongst you, and let us live as brethren.”